I never really understood the distaste for it, or how it’s non-obvious. It seems like the people I’ve talked to object to the punctuation-based syntax more than the semantics, because it exactly mirrors conditional statements, even when nested. (Well, except in PHP, but that’s a bug in the grammar.)

    if (a) { b } else   if (c) { d } else { e }
        a  ? b   :          c  ? d   :      e

    if (a) { b } else { if (c) { d } else { e } }
        a  ? b   :    (     c  ? d   :      e   )

The question mark goes after the thing you’re asking about, like in English. The colon to separate the true and false branches is totally arbitrary, I grant you. I’d prefer to have the if…else notation available as an expression, but the statement-expression distinction hasn’t quite died yet.

Personally, I don’t care for Python’s version with the condition and true branch swapped, because I read it like invalid Forth, expecting “condition IF true-branch ELSE false-branch THEN”. :P